Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less (Revised and Updated)

by Jim Vandehei

Eye-tracking studies show that we spend 26 seconds, on average, reading a piece of content. • On average, we spend fewer than 15 seconds on most of the web pages we click. Here’s another crazy stat: One study found that our brain decides in 17 milliseconds if we like what we just clicked. If not, we zip on.

Stewart Butterfield, the CEO of Slack, told us that, in a hypothetical 10,000-employee company that spends $1 billion on payroll, 50 to 60 percent of the average employee’s time is spent on communication of some sort. Yet no one provides the tools and training to do this well.

A lunch-spattered piece of paper hangs on the wall of the Arlington, Virginia, newsroom of our start-up, Axios. It reads: “Brevity is confidence. Length is fear.”

Start by accepting that most people will scan or skip most of what you communicate—and then make every word and sentence count.

You will see quick and substantial results if you do. • Smart Brevity will make you more efficient and effective at work, a more forceful communicator and more useful and memorable on social media. Your voice and words will

Whether in a tweet, headline or email subject line, you need six or fewer strong words to yank someone’s attention away from Tinder or TikTok. 2 One strong first sentence, or “lede”: Your opening sentence should be the most memorable—tell me something I don’t know, would want to know, should know. Make this sentence as direct, short and sharp as possible. 3 Context, or “Why it matters”: We’re all faking it. Mike and I learned this speaking to Fortune 500 CEOs. We all know a lot about a little. We’re too ashamed or afraid to ask, but we almost always need you to explain why your new fact, idea or thought matters. 4 The choice to learn more, or “Go deeper”: Don’t force someone to read or hear more than

For a secret agency, the CIA has a lot of writers, enough to fill a theater, which is where Mike found himself back in 2019. He’d been asked to talk to the crowd about his favorite tricks for figuring out what’s truly interesting in a pile of data. • His tip, which works every time: Ask the author of the data what’s the most interesting thing about it. They know what it is—and they’ll tell you. • But if you ask them to write a report about it, they’ll either bury it or, more likely, leave it out. The CIA puts together the ultimate newsletter—the

This was back when you had to click a little number at the bottom of each page to get to the next. It turns out, about 80 percent of people stopped reading on the first page, meaning they consumed, at most, 490 of our self-important words. And these were stories many in politics and media were talking about. • We called around to other publications and places like Facebook to find out if their mileage was the same. Yep. We discovered that most people—casual readers, politicians and CEOs alike—read only the headline and a few paragraphs of most stories. Around this time, the three of us fought and won an internal war to create Politico Pro, a subscription news service that charged businesses and lobbyists tens of thousands of dollars for news on niche topics like agriculture or health-care policies. • We started mass-producing long stories as well as short bursts of information, often just 200 words, in newsletters or alerts. Fortune 500 companies gladly paid a lot for this service. Business was booming. • A few years in, we surveyed the readers, some of whom were now coughing up $100,000-plus a year for it. We asked what was most valuable to them—people who need depth and nuance to do their jobs. Roughly 5 percent said they valued longer stories the most.

pope did what you should do: Start any communication by thinking first of your very specific audience and what they need or want. Picture in your head the person you’re trying to reach. This is easy if it’s a single individual, but if you’re targeting a group, zero in on a specific individual, a name, a face, a job. • Always do this before you start communicating. If you try to speak to everyone, usually you reach no one. Singling out the person you want to reach clarifies things big-time.

Focus on ONE person you are targeting. ➋ Plot out ONE thing you want them to remember.

Here’s the hack: Talk to someone else (or yourself—no one will know) about the point you want to make. • It’ll be clearer, more interesting and more urgent than anything you’d ever come up with if you sat down to “write.” ➍ Then write it down.

Write down that one thing you want the reader, viewer or listener to remember if it’s all they take away. Write that before doing anything else. • Then try to shorten it to fewer than a dozen words—less is more. It should be a declarative statement or data point, not a question. Make sure it’s new or essential. Scrub the weak words and delete any soggy verbs or adjectives.

Ronald Yaros, a University of Maryland professor, uses eye-tracking studies to capture what we really read. He found that most people simply scan most content most of the time. Why it matters: Yaros, who has conducted these studies for years, says that on average, the typical person spends just 26 seconds on a story or update. He calls it “time on text.” Anything written after that? Usually wasted.

Our takeaway: In a world full of noise, people reward you if you respect their time and intelligence. This truth is universal. The opposite is true too: They find you annoying if you chew up their time.

“Write your business email or letter. Then, when you’ve written the whole thing, go back and make the first two to three sentences say all of what you wrote below. It’s often the only part that gets read.”

➍ Delete, delete, delete. What words, sentences or paragraphs can you eliminate before sending? Every word or sentence you can shave saves the other person time. Less is more—and a gift.

The Axios audience team found that roughly 6 words is the optimal subject line for emails—short enough to show all words in a mobile phone format.

Stop being funny. Or ironic. Or cryptic. It’s confusing, not clever.

If there is one thing you take away from this book, it is this: Learn to identify and trumpet ONE thing you want people to know. And do it in ONE strong sentence. Or no one will ever remember it. This is your most important point—or what journalists call “the lede.”

After you do an interview or cover an event, call your editor, roommate or significant other and tell them what happened. That’s your first sentence. Every. Single. Time.

One Easter weekend, Mike was with his family in a place with slow internet and not much news happening. He said: “It’s Easter—no one’s going to complain if their newsletter isn’t long enough.” So, instead of Mike’s Top 10, he sent out Mike’s Big 6. • When he went back to the regular format on Monday, he got emails: “Where can I sign up for the Big 6 version?” Humbling, and telling.

anything longer is a book, not a newsletter. Trim it. • Anything longer than 1,200 words total is too long. Under 1,000 is ideal. Trim it.

PowerPoints are a hotbed for graffiti and eye torture. People smother their ideas or proposals with crappy art and word diarrhea, then hit repeat for a dozen or more slides. A quick fix: • Start your presentation with your big idea, distilled using the tricks for teases in chapter 6. • Each point you make on subsequent slides should have a similarly taut headline and then a few bullet points with the shortest ONE sentence possible. Rule of thumb: If you have more than 20 words on a slide, try again.

Rarely should you exceed five or six slides.

Prior to BP, Morrell worked at the Pentagon as a top aide to defense secretary Bob Gates. He remembered seeing long memos with a short summary up top labeled “BLUF.” “BLUF” meant “Bottom Line Up Front”—the military’s version of Smart Brevity. Everyone read the “BLUF.” Few read the whole memo.

Smart Brevity forces you to write like a normal person. Morrell was struck by the way we send text messages in staccato sentence fragments that the recipient instantly grasps, but our business writing is a laborious mess.

Cal Newport, a Georgetown University expert on workplace efficiency, notes in A World Without Email that the onslaught for the average business user has ballooned from 50 emails per day in 2005 to 126 in 2019. So there is a fierce urgency to getting better at this fast.

Get the audience on your side from the beginning: Start with a real-life story that hopefully ends with a chuckle. You defeat the purpose if you go on for more than one winning joke or anecdote.

Here’s a secret of TED, the nonprofit that sponsors these gems: Every talk is 18 minutes or less—no matter who you are. • Chris Anderson, the head of TED, says that’s “short enough to hold people’s attention,” but “long enough to say something that matters.” Not a bad formula.

“Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that claimed to make you beautiful but didn’t,” information design theorist Edward Tufte once said of PowerPoint. “Instead, the drug had frequent, serious side effects: making us stupid, degrading the quality and credibility of our communication, turning us into bores, wasting our colleagues’ time. These side effects, and resulting unsatisfactory cost/benefit ratio, would rightly lead to a worldwide recall.”

Neurologists say that when we’re taking in new information, our brains can process a maximum of two stimuli—say, spoken word and pictures. But throw a bunch of bulleted text on top of that? You’ve lost me. Read from slides? Forget about it—your audience sure has.

He discovered that adding an arresting image can increase recall to 65 percent, compared to 10 percent if a person simply hears it.

Educational theory shows we can process a presentation best if it has one big idea, backed by three to five points. It’s like Smart Brevity anywhere else.

• The Harvard Business Review says a partner at McKinsey tells new hires to use this rule of thumb: For every 20 slides you want to put in your deck, use 2.

Pick clean, simple, arresting images to pull in your audience. All three are visual platforms—Twitter the least so—but words without art are a loser everywhere.

Every employee owns equity in Axios, and we’ll answer any question, with two exceptions—how much someone makes and why someone left. We stay silent on those two out of respect for individual privacy.

We tell leaders and friends from other companies and in our personal lives that their right-hand person should be a communicator, not an operator or money whiz.

This tip is gold: • Swap one identity for another—one race or ethnicity for another, one nationality for another—and see if the language and intention of the sentence remain nonjudgmental.

The bottom line: Offend me or confuse me and you’ve lost me. Not just for this newsletter or presentation, but for good. • Case in point: One in five children report learning disabilities, according to the National Center for Learning Disabilities. If this holds true into adulthood, you are talking about 65 million Americans. So, this could be 20 percent of your audience.